Chapter 104 17.6 From the gliding accident to the game of life

However, Chris Langton doesn't think artificial life that can create its own civilization is a fantasy.As a maverick who has pioneered a trendy field in artificial life, Langton is under a lot of pressure.His story is worth telling because his own experience reproduces the awakening of a man-made, open evolutionary system. A few years ago, Longton and I attended a week-long scientific conference in Tucson, and we skipped the afternoon to clear our heads.I was invited to visit the unfinished Biosphere 2 project, about an hour away.Langton told me the story of his life as we smoothed our way down the winding black ribbon of asphalt in the southern Arizona basin.

At the time, Langton was working as a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.The entire town and the Los Alamos laboratory were originally built to develop the ultimate weapon.So I was surprised that Langton said at the beginning of the story that he was a draft objector during the Vietnam War. A conscientious objector, Langton was offered an alternative to military service as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.He was assigned a drudgery that no one would want to do: moving bodies from the hospital basement to the mortuary basement.During their first week on the job, Langton and his partner placed a body on a gurney and wheeled it through the cold, dank underground corridor that connected the two buildings.They had to push gurneys across a narrow concrete bridge under the only light in the tunnel.When the gurney hit the bump, the corpse hiccupped, sat up, and started sliding off the gurney!Langdon turned automatically to grab his partner, only to see the distant door swinging back and forth behind his fleeing colleague.Dead things can act like they're alive!Life is a kind of behavior, this is Langton's first experience.

Longton told his boss he couldn't do that kind of work anymore, could he do something else? "Can you write computer programs?" the boss asked him. "of course." So he got a job writing programs for early computers.Sometimes, he'll leave a boring game running on an idle computer at night.Called "Life," the game was designed by John Conway and rewritten for the console by an early hacker named Bill Gosper.The game is a set of very simple codes that can generate a variety of forms, in a pattern reminiscent of the growth, replication and reproduction of biological cells on an agar plate.Langton recalled a day when he was working alone late into the night when he suddenly felt someone in the room, something alive staring at him.He looked up, and on the "life" screen he saw the amazing pattern of self-replicating cells.After a few minutes, he felt that presence again.He looked up again, only to see that the pattern was dead.It dawned on him that the pattern had lived—alive, and as literally as cells on an agar plate—but on a computer screen.Maybe a computer program could come to life—a bold idea came to Langton's mind.

He started playing with the game, studying it, wondering if he could design an open, "Life"-like game where things could start to evolve on their own.He practiced programming skills hard.During this period, Langton received a task: to transplant a program from an outdated mainframe computer to a new computer with a completely different structure.The trick to this task is to abstract how the hardware worked on the old computer and emulate it in software on the new computer—that is, to take the behavior of the hardware and convert it into invisible symbols.In this way, the old program can run in a virtual old computer system emulated by software on the new computer.Langton said, "It's the direct experience of transferring a process from one medium to another. It doesn't matter what the hardware is, because you can run the program on any hardware. It's important to capture the essence of the process." This made him wonder whether life can also be extracted from carbon structures and transformed into silicon structures.

After his alternative military service, Langdon spent a summer paragliding.He and a friend got a $25-a-day job paragliding over Old Man Mountain in North Carolina to attract tourists.They spent hours each time in the air with winds gusting forty miles per hour.One day, a gust of wind hit Langdon, causing him to fall from the sky.He fell to the ground in a fetal position and broke 35 bones, including all the bones in his head except the skull.Although his knee shattered his face, he was still alive.He was bedridden for the next six months in a semi-comatose state. While recovering from a severe concussion, Langton felt as if he was watching his brain "reboot," as if the computer had to reload the operating system when it restarted.The deep functions of his brain reappeared one by one.Langdon remembers the moment of eureka moment when his proprioception—the sense of being in a body—recovered.He was overwhelmed by a "strong, deep gut feeling" of his perceived id melting into the flesh, as if his machine had finished rebooting and was waiting to be put to use. "I have first-hand experience of what it's like to have a mind-forming mind," he told me.Just as he had seen life on a computer, so now he had a visceral awareness of his own life in the machine.Can life exist independently of the matrix?Couldn't the life in his body be the same as the life in the computer?

Wouldn't it be great, he thought, to evolve something alive in a computer!He felt that we should start with human culture.Simulating human culture seems much easier than simulating cells and DNA.As a senior at Arizona State University, Langton wrote a thesis titled "The Evolution of Culture."He hoped that his anthropology, physics, and computer science professors would buy into his idea of ​​building a computer that could run an artificial evolutionary program and earn a degree with it, but they discouraged him from doing so.He bought an Apple II computer with his own money and programmed his first artificial world.He was not able to achieve self-replication or natural selection, but he found a large literature on cellular automata - the literature shows that the "Game of Life" is just one example of a cellular automata model.

At this time, he came across John von Neumann's arguments for artificial self-replication in the 1940s.Von Neumann came up with a self-replicating landmark formula.But the procedure to implement this formula is lengthy and convoluted.For the next few months, Langton coded nightly on his Apple II computer (an advantage von Neumann did not have; he did his coding on paper with a pencil. .).Finally, guided by his dream of creating life in silicon, Langton designed the smallest self-replicator known at the time.On a computer screen, the self-replicator looks like a little blue Q.In this 94-character loop, Langton crammed not only the complete loop statement, but also instructions on how to make the copy and how to throw out the copied alter ego.He is so excited.If he can design such a simple replicator, how many other key processes of life can he imitate?Furthermore, what other processes are indispensable to life?

A careful search of the available literature reveals that there is very little written on this simple question, and that limited treatment is scattered among hundreds of papers.Langton is emboldened by a new research position at the Los Alamos lab. In 1987, he convened the "Interdisciplinary Symposium on Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems"—the first conference to discuss (what Langton now calls) the problem of artificial life.Looking for any system that exhibits the behavior of a living system, Langton offers this workshop for chemists, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, materials scientists, philosophers, roboticists and computer animators.I was one of the few journalists at the meeting.